Official Report: search what was said in Parliament
The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.
The Official Report search offers lots of different ways to find the information you’re looking for. The search is used as a professional tool by researchers and third-party organisations. It is also used by members of the public who may have less parliamentary awareness. This means it needs to provide the ability to run complex searches, and the ability to browse reports or perform a simple keyword search.
Searching by different views
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
- Report: this is the whole Official Report for a particular meeting of a committee or Parliament
- Item of business: this is each individual agenda item in an Official Report. For example, Portfolio Questions would be the item of business in a Meeting of the Parliament report
- Contribution: this is each time someone has made a spoken contribution to a meeting.
Depending on the kind of search you want to do, one of these views will be the best option. The default view is to show the report for each meeting of Parliament or a committee. For a simple keyword search, the results will be shown by item of business.
Search by MSP
When you choose to search by a particular MSP, the results returned will show each spoken contribution in Parliament or a committee, ordered by date with the most recent contributions first. This will usually return a lot of results, but you can refine your search by keyword, date and/or by meeting (committee or Chamber business).
We’ve chosen to display the entirety of each MSP’s contribution in the search results. This is intended to reduce the number of times that users need to click into an actual report to get the information that they’re looking for, but in some cases it can lead to very short contributions (“Yes.”) or very long ones (Ministerial statements, for example.) We’ll keep this under review and get feedback from users on whether this approach best meets their needs.
Searching by keyword
There are two types of keyword search:
- A keyword search without quotation marks will look for every instance of each word used and rank the results by frequency and proximity. It will also include variants of the keywords using “porter stemming”. This is when the search looks for the “stem” of a word regardless of its ending. So, for example, a search for [salmon farm] will return each instance of “salmon” and each instance of “farm” as well as potentially including results for “farms”, “farmed” and “farming”.
- A keyword search with quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase used. So, for example, a search for “salmon farm” in quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase.
Combining search filters
If you select an MSP’s name from the dropdown menu, and add a phrase in quotation marks to the keyword field, then the search will return only examples of when the MSP said those exact words. You can further refine this search by adding a date range or selecting a particular committee or Meeting of the Parliament.
More complex keyword searches
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
- a search for “salmon farm” AND “Loch Lomond” will return only results which include both exact phrases
- a search for “salmon farm” NOT “Loch Lomond” will return results for “salmon farm” but exclude results which also include “Loch Lomond”
- a search for “salmon farm” OR “Loch Lomond” will return all results for “salmon farm” and all results for “Loch Lomond” regardless of whether they appear together
Searching by date
There are two ways of searching by date.
You can either use the Start date and End date options to run a search across a particular date range. For example, you may know that a particular subject was discussed at some point in the last few weeks and choose a date range to reflect that.
Alternatively, you can use one of the pre-defined date ranges under “Select a time period”. These are:
- Current session (all Official Reports since the current sessions started)
- Last 6 months
- Last 12 months
- each of the previous sessions of Parliament. (Selecting the information icon above the “Select a time period” menu will give you the exact dates for each session.)
- All sessions
- You can also choose to select a custom date range, although adding a Start or End date will mean the search automatically defaults to this option.
If you search by an individual session, the list of MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs and committees will update to show the information that was current at that time.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
Criathragan Hide all filters
Displaying 1837 contributions
|
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
Is that a good thing? We talked about that earlier in our evidence session with the Ethical Standards Commissioner. I do not know whether you watched that.
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
That is very helpful. You mentioned that the high level of turnover among NHS chief executives is due in large part to retirement. If I understood you correctly, in the past two years, eight of the 14 NHS board chief executives have left due to retirement. Is that just unfortunate coincidence or is it spectacularly bad planning?
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
Okay—it is just a coincidence, then. However, we have also seen a lot of turnover at IJBs. Audit Scotland reported that over half of IJBs had a turnover of senior leadership positions involving either their chief officer or chief financial officers in the year 2023-24—over half of IJBs had changes at that leadership level. Were those also retirements? Were people moving on to other parts of the health system? Were people sacked for poor governance or performance?
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
I will ask a more direct question. Is it appropriate for the chief executive or chair of the non-executive board of an NHS board that is under special measures, for example, to be allowed to apply for a job in another NHS board? Is that a sign of success in their role?
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
That is good to know.
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
Good morning. My first question, off the back of the previous series of questions, is on the diversity of boards and public appointments. Mr Bruce, you will obviously be aware that, outside of this room, there is a much wider discussion and narrative on the use of diversity, equality and inclusion in public appointments, including those of board members and chairs. There is a large school of thought in either direction as to the importance or necessity of that.
I am not particularly asking for your view on the politics of all that but, as someone who has oversight of appointments to quite senior positions across 100-odd agencies, what is your view on that?
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
That is interesting. There is a valid debate around how far one should go to ensure diversity; again, there is a spectrum of views on that. I am sure that other members around the table have sat on recruitment panels for public appointments; I have done a couple over the years, and there was little diversity among the candidates that made it through the sifting process, yet there were good candidates who I felt would have added diversity due to not just their protected characteristics but what they would have brought to the table. People simply do not make it through due to the quite rigorous and specified points-based systems that we often use for such panels; they rule people out of the process early on, unfortunately, and I have not found that to be a good thing.
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
That is very helpful, and I think that members of the Scottish Parliament might be first on my list of people to invite you to talk to. We have obviously had a lot of board members in front of us over the years and we have seen some of the most egregious failures of boards, particularly off the back of reports from the Auditor General, and they tend to fall into one of two categories. One is where there is a blurring of relationships between boards, chairs, executive management teams, the agencies that work for organisations full time, and the Scottish Government sponsors and civil servants.
The other category is where there has been a complete breakdown of those relationships. What proactive work do you do to look at those relationships? What have you identified in any work that you have done?
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
Parliament has power to legislate in that area.
Public Audit Committee
“NHS in Scotland: Spotlight on governance”
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Jamie Greene
Is that a problem for you? It seems like a reactive role rather than a proactive one. You have already identified some patterns of issues in the NHS around turnover and the failure rate for chair appointments, for example, and the issues that certain boards are having in recruiting board members and so on. You have, over a longer period, a nice wide view of that. Would you like the power to have a more proactive role in digging into investigations in the same way that Audit Scotland, if it so chooses, can do a report on a particular body? Would you like to be able to do the same?
